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NaNoWriMo, Stephenie Meyer, and How I Ended Up In an MFA Program

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nanowrimo

That title is no joke, my friends. All three of those things are related.

Since we’re less than a week from the beginning of November—and, hence, the start of NaNoWriMo 2014—I think the time is right for me to share my NaNoWriMo story and make a case for NaNoWriMo being a great thing.

National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 and has grown over the past 15 years into a legitimate nonprofit organization that encourages literary creativity and the massive production of words. Last year, 310,095 people participated with the goal of writing 50,000 words—the length, more or less, of a novella really—in the month of November. There’s an online community with access to local face-to-face events with other NaNoWriMo participants in your area. And, of course, Twitter is alive in the month of November with updates on how everyone’s work is progressing.

The point of all this is simply to get that story down on paper. Focus on producing, not editing or perfecting. Knock out the first draft. You can always revise later. It’s a process I fully endorse.

What does this have to do with me? Well, let’s travel back in time to 2009.

I was a boarder in the home of a married couple who spent (and perhaps still spend) their evenings watching terrible reality television. (Other than that, they are lovely, lovely people.) I was dating a boy who lived just over an hour away. I was still rebuilding my post-divorce social circles.

In other words, I had a lot of time on my hands.

I had also for some time been reconsidering several life choices and was returning to writing, partly as a way to heal after my divorce and also, perhaps just maybe, as a legitimate career. I was almost obsessively keeping a journal at the time and writing geology/geography related articles for the now defunct Suite101.com. (I mean, I might as well get some use out of that geology degree, right?)

That August, still with plenty of free time to kill, I decided to read the Twilight series. My boyfriend’s sister-in-law was obsessed. Several of my coworkers were obsessed. Many of my girlfriends were obsessed…and aghast upon learning that I hadn’t already read it. So I borrowed the sister-in-law’s hardcover (yes, hardcover) copies of all four books and got reading.

I finished all of the books before the month was over.

I actually read New Moon in a day and a half.

What was wrong with me? Even as I read, I knew the sentence-level writing was atrocious, even for YA fare. Bella was an insufferable twit who fell down way too often to just be clumsy. Certainly a traumatic brain injury would explain both her lack of motor skills and her morose, co-dependent personality.

But there was a part of me that was a bit sucked in. (No pun intended.) I found myself thinking, Oh, no, that werewolf did NOT just imprint on that baby! and Ugh, Jacob is so fucking pathetic. MOVE ON, DUDE.

Reading all four Twilight books was not an especially enjoyable exercise, but at the very least, I could now get all the jokes, spoofs, and complaints.

Afterwards, I couldn’t shake my nagging disbelief (and jealousy) at Stephenie Meyer’s good fortune.  A Mormon housewife sits down to write a terrible, terrible teenage vampire love story and becomes a gazillionaire. She wasn’t even good at writing. Now me—I was good at writing. I knew it. People had been telling me since the second grade that I was good at writing. I won a statewide writing award when I was 10. I had been accused of plagiarizing my term paper for Paleobiology because the crotchety old prof didn’t believe that a mere undergrad could write so well. At work, I was the email/memo/official letter proofreader and resident Grammar Nazi. Oh, I could write.

So if Stephenie Meyer could write that Twilight garbage and become a pop culture phenomenon, I could probably at least publish some fiction, right?

That’s when my cousin, the English major copy editor, told me about NaNoWriMo. I should do it, she said. She could never. Fictioning is too hard. But I could do it.

So during September, I began jotting notes, formulating characters and a story, one that had been circulating in my head for years. It was sort of chick lit in nature, but I already knew I hated chick lit. I wanted it to be smart chick lit. I wanted it to be a little dark, a little difficult, a little closer to reality than standard rom-com-on-the-page chick lit stories.

On November 1st, I began. Each night I came home to make my daily word goal. On my lunch break, I wrote by hand because the story wouldn’t leave me alone. Then I’d sit on my bed later typing up the chicken scratch. It was frustrating. It was exhilarating.

On November 30th, I had almost 55,000 words. I was a NaNoWriMo winner.

nanowrimowinner

I kept writing. By the end of the year, I had 75,000 words.

Then I stopped. There was no point in continuing the story to completion. I didn’t know how it would end because there wasn’t much of a beginning. As I went back to read the first few chapters, I realized that what I had was back story, descriptions of setting, and way too much main character interiority. It didn’t read like any novel I’d ever read, even really bad ones. It wasn’t smart chick lit. It was a hot mess. And I had lost interest in my characters, lost interest in the story.

This, I realized, wasn’t going to be my first published novel. This was just a warm-up exercise. Proof that I could do it. All the literary creativity that had taken a backseat to my science education was still there. Rusty. But there.

The novel was bad, but I wanted more. I wanted to write more, to have my writing do more, be more.

I needed to really study the craft of writing.

For the next six months, I researched ways I could become a better writer. I looked for books on the craft, but I didn’t even know which ones I should be looking for. I looked for local writing groups, but they all seemed to be amateurs and retirees writing genre fiction for fun, which isn’t at all what I wanted to write. So I looked at the MFA program at my local university. That’s what I needed, I determined. People who knew how to write the sort of stuff I like to read and who could teach me to do the same. I needed to go back to school.

My boyfriend (who’s now my husband) supported me. My family supported. Most of my friends supported me. (Some asked why I needed to go back to school full-time in order to write. Couldn’t I just write in my spare time…like Stephenie Meyer?)

In August 2010, just a year after finishing the Twilight abomination, I started coursework toward my BA in English at the University of South Carolina. And in August 2012 started my MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

I have a full draft of a (much better) novel and am in the midst of revisions. My brain is already forming ideas for my next novel (a story whose roots are in a secondary character from that first NaNoWriMo story). I just received my first fiction acceptance by a literary journal this past weekend. I am writing fiction. I am improving my craft. I am building a legitimate writing career.

All thanks to Stephenie Meyer and NaNoWriMo.

So go forth, brave, budding novelists. Your NaNoWriMo project may garbage. It may never get published. You may never want to look at it again after November 30th. But it may be the start of an unexpected adventure.


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